In an existing communication manner, there are mainly two communication modes, namely, human to human (H2H) and machine to machine (M2M). An H2H application mainly refers to communication with humans being communication subjects, such as telephone communication. However, an M2M application is also called a machine type communications (MTC) application, and refers to network communication performed between multiple network elements without involvement of humans, such as traffic control and management, factory equipment monitoring, and remote meter reading.
Furthermore, a network operator or a user within an industry may perform management and control on an M2M group as a whole. For example, in a remote meter reading application in a power industry, all electric meters in a certain region may form a group, a network operator or a power industry user may perform management and control on the group as a whole. In addition, the network operator or the user within the industry may also perform management and control on all M2M user devices having a same M2M application characteristic as a whole. For example, a network operator or a user within an industry may perform management and control on multiple M2M user devices under a same industrial user as a whole (by forming a group). Each M2M terminal device in the group may subscribe to same subscription data, or each M2M terminal device in the group may share one piece of subscription data (group subscription data).
In the human to human communication mode, if subscription data of a user changes, a home subscription database (HLR/HSS) initiates a subscription data modification procedure. According to acquired new subscription data, a mobility management network element (MME/SGSN) may initiate a session management procedure, for example, a bearer modification procedure. For a group formed of M2M user devices, if subscription data changes, subscription data of all user devices in the group may change; or in a scenario where all user devices in a group share group subscription data, when the group subscription data changes, an existing session management procedure is initiated based on user device granularity, however, because the number of user devices in the group is large, a large number of signaling overheads of a network side is caused, which may result in signaling congestion to the network side, and increase a network load.